I went this past weekend to Dublin, a city I expected to look… less new. Somehow, I’ve been spoiled a bit by living in the quaint town of Delft that magically stores nerdy tech students infinitely in its canals (or perhaps in the wind).

The first day I got there before my companions, so I decided on a day trip to Howth, pronounced more like “Hoath,” to walk around the peninsula. I was surprised by the public prevalence of written Gaelic, and then while on the train ride to Hoath I realized it didn’t matter whether which language local young teenage girls spoke, because I couldn’t understand anything with their accents.

Near the beginning of my journey around the peninsula (my free map from a coffee shop makes it look very Lord of the Rings), fate brought me to a fellow lone traveler from Germany named Oda, who was stood up last second by her friend for her birthday trip to Dublin.

We happily trekked along the surprisingly empty, surprisingly steep, surprisingly narrow path for the first hour or two… and a bit more tired for the remaining couple hours getting back to the train station.

For the rest of the weekend we hit up the touristy stuff, but also stopped by a small design market on Saturday that was a bit eclectic. I bought a necklace from Aoife, who is on a mission to bring bone-carving back to its Irish roots (who knew it started there?). Apparently the butcher starts gathering bones when he sees her coming. Nice.

Other favorites from the trip:

more decently priced and locally brewed beer at Messrs. Maguire

food from the Hairy Lemon

old school Guinness advertisements illustrated by John Gilroy

And one surprising thing I found was that I missed the size of Dutch beers. Half a liter of beer is just too much for me if I want to do anything other than sit down and be lazy. Really lazy.